Searching help.ubuntu.com does not work anymore..

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:45 AM, markoresko <minikola at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was trying to find something on help ubunut.com today..
> And search for community documentation didn`t work.
>
> It only works if you enable Google.com scripts. And I will not. Ever.

I helped Matt implement this, so I suppose I should respond to this flame...

> So please, enable Search on help.ubuntu.com like it was before.
> I will not use google search inside help.ubunut.com.
> It it:
> 1. Ugly

Really?  I agree that the advertisements should go away, and perhaps
we can work with Canonical to perhaps pay off Google to remove those.
They did it for search.ubuntu.com (which uses Google).  But otherwise,
I don't see anything "Ugly" about it.

> 2. Google-dependent

Is that so bad?  Google is strong supporter of Linux, cross-platform
utilities, and Ubuntu in general.

I'll also note that you wrote this email from a Google gmail.com address.

> 3. Forcing users to allow Google java script to work on their machines.

I would agree that it would be nice to have a workable fall-back plan
for users who don't have javascript enabled.  This is the distinct
minority in today's world, however.

Matt, could we enable the legacy search page at another url, and
perhaps link to it somewhere?

> 4. Killing user`s privacy
>  (since, people does not use help.ubuntu.com, but google.com)

I've agreed that we should work on removing the ads.

But I'm having a hard time conceiving of situations where you're
willing to input search terms in a form on help.ubuntu.com, but
unwilling to allow help.ubuntu.com to retrieve results from
google.com....

If privacy is an ultimate concern, you should consider using any one
of a number of Tor-type proxy solutions.  See FoxyProxy, if you use
Firefox.

> If we as community can`t use, make and administer one small search host
> for our internal documentation page

Writing a search engine from scratch is remarkably difficult.  I've tried.

I've also implemented and used an locally hosted open source search
engine in the past, Mnogosearch.  The feedback from my users was
extremely negative.  They had come to expect search results to match
the format and quality of Google, which they used for everything else.

Do you have another suggestion for a better search engine?

>, then I would be ashamed to tell
> to people:
>
> "Go to help.ubuntu.com : they are so weak they don`t even have their
> documentation search , but they use Google for that.." ~:-|

We didn't see any advantage in re-inventing the wheel here.

Like it or not, Google has become the de facto standard for searching
on the web.  They're quite good at it.  And they've made tools
available to customize such search engines.

If you have a constructive solution in mind, I'm sure Matt is quite
interested in hearing...

-- 
:-Dustin